Extra Seriem Weidmann

Clemens Weidmann, Augustinus und das Maximinianistenkonzil von Cebarsussi. Zur historischen und textgeschichtlichen Bedeutung von Enarratio in psalmum 36, 2, 18-23. – Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1998.
We owe to the controversy between the Catholics and Donatists in North Africa a document which permits not merely valuable insights into the organization of the Donatist church, but also interesting philological observations on the manuscript tradition of Augustine’s Enarrationes in psalmos. In the context of his exegesis of Psalm 36 Augustine cites the letter of the Council of Cebarsussi (June 24, 393), in which approximately 100 Donatist bishops condemn their primate, Primian of Carthage and opt for the party of his opponent, Maximian. The document ends with a list of signatures containing more than fifty names. — Through a careful examination of the manuscripts which contain the Enarratio in psalmum 36 and through a comparison with other documents which offer no textual problems, many new pieces of historical information, especially the names of the bishops and of their sees, have been acquired. Since the text of the letter does not properly belong to the exegesis of the psalm and has remained unaffected by manuscript contamination, it is possible to use it to identify different ways in which errors were introduced and to recognize particular characteristics of the individual manuscripts of the Enarrationes in psalmos.